[Buddha-l] Buddhas Meditation

[Dan Lusthaus]

Franz,

Working through those implications out loud in front of the rest of us WAS 
doing something productive.

The standard Buddhist response to the dispassionate murderer ultimately 
feeling the pain (that may or may not lead to remorse) is that such actions, 
being karmic, will lead eventually to bad results, like hell-births. Since 
mobsters and other assorted nasty folks often live comfortably into very old 
age, most religions attempting to reinforce such moralistic warnings resort 
to transcendental justice, i.e., they may get away with it here in this 
life, but in the next life (lives) they'll get their just deserts.

Putting the transcendental justice aside, the other thing to keep in mind is 
that today, having mechanized destruction, so that a guy basically playing a 
computer game in Virginia can take out a building full of people in some 
asian mountains makes the occasion of nonagitated, cool, calm, collected, 
and rational killing very much a live and current occurrence. The 
face-to-face encounter one conjurs up in one's imagination of a sweaty, 
disturbed, agitated person killing people while in some sort of non-ordinary 
state of consciousness is more a product of the too many movies we see than 
the reality out there, since, even in face-to-face encounters, when one kid 
kills another for his sneakers or lunch money, little remorse or anguish 
accompanies the act, and probably no more greed than when you eye a tasty 
morsel in a vending machine and start rummaging through your pocket for 
change.

One more complication -- and this perhaps directed at those who are painting 
this all as some absolutist rhetoric -- there may in fact be times and 
places when cool, calm, collected killing is the ethical thing to do. And, 
in self-defense or defense of one's daughter, even an agitated huffing and 
weazing killing of a perpetrator may be the right and necessary thing to do. 
Not all killings are the same. But hacking down harmless redwoods, who 
cannot speak in their defense (or at least loud enough so that some with 
closed ears may hear them), is not justifiable, and certainly not with 
argument based on 'inevitable' death for these longevity champions -- unless 
one is incredibly cynical and nihilistic.

> The now unresolved question in my
> mind is: Is the suffering a person doing harm experiences kusala or at
> least useful? If so--and it does seem so in the family-killing
> illustration--then we might want more it, not less.

That seems, IMO, a game one plays with oneself in order to justify taking a 
certain attitude vis-a-vis that person, not something that can be fairly 
determined from afar in the abstract. In the abstract, to conjure up the 
term again, it would be anaikantika, indeterminate, or its karmic 
equivalent, aniyata (= could go either way). Both anaikanta and aniyata are 
translated into Chinese with the same expression: bu ding 不定.

Dan